Dell Mini 3i is an Android-based smartphone for chineese market. It has a 3-megapixel camera and GPS with included software. Chinese site Sina got several photos. Dell Mini 3i looks like a genetic experiment between the Palm Pre and the iPhone:

Recentrly we've talked about Nokia and their willingness to enter into direct competition with the iPhone releasing new devices based on Linux. Now on the official Nokia website we can already pre-order the new mini tablet N900.

The operating system is the Maemo 5, that is based on Linux. It has an ARM Cortex A8 processor with 256MB of RAM for applications and other 768MB in virtual memory, so total is 1GB. So the multi-tasking is guaranteed. The graphics uses Open GL | ES 2.0, which is quite good.

The new operating system is much more flexible compared to Symbian. The Web browser is developed by Mozilla and is capable of playing Flash 9.4 movies and animations.

It looks like an iPhone but lacks the Home. It also has a sliding QWERTY keyboard. The screen resolution is 800 × 480 pixels (16:9). There are two cameras. The main has 5 MP with Carl Zeiss optics, Tessar lens and two LEDs for flash. The onboard memory is 32GB but can be expanded with microSD to additional 48GB.

The target price (tax excluded) is 500 euro. Nokia N900 will be available starting from October.

AdMob published it's June report, showing detailed statistics about smartphone market. As for iPhone 54% of iPhone OS devices are currently in the US; however, this number has slowly declined from 61% in the last six months, implying that international users are growing faster than those in the US. Following the US, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France each have over 5% of users. As a region, Western Europe has a 26% share of iPhone and iPod touch users.

Based on Apple guidance, the company has shipped 26.4 million iPhones and approximately 18.6 million iPod touches to date.

Here is a table, that shows the number of iPhones by country:

Here's some interesting statistics about smartphone traffic. Sounds like Apple is looking quite good in both the US and the rest of the world:

Solopalmari made a comparison between the 4 devices: iPhone 3GS, Nokia N97, HTC Touch Pro2 and HTC Hero. For each of these we will see a photo (click to zoom) and a video (download). For each device Solopalmari specialists calculated a rating based on test results. And the winner is.. let's see:

Generator Research says that Nokia's smartphone marketshare will plummet from over 40 percent today to only 20 percent by 2013. They predict that Apple, on the other hand, will hit 33 percent marketshare by that point, matching Nokia sometime in 2011—just two years away—with 77 million phones.

That scenario, though, depends on some awesome conditions for Apple (think about 77 million iPhones!) on top of some truly horrific ignorance from Nokia, letting the smartphone market go almost entirely with a half-assed defense of its position as it focuses on profits from its mass volume low-cost wares in developing countries. Probably Nokia will stop making smartphones like the N97 some day and will create something nice.

Medialets today released the results of JavaScript benchmark tests performed using the SunSpider test suite on the iPhone 3G and 3GS, the T-Mobile G1 running Android, and the Palm Pre running webOS. The use of the SunSpider suite for benchmarking studies enables cross-platform comparisons among the devices, as they all utilize WebKit-based Web browsers. In the Medialets study, the iPhone 3GS outperformed the Palm Pre by a factor of three and the T-Mobile G1 by over a factor of five.

Notably, Medialets also tested the iPhone 3G running both iPhone OS 2.2.1 and OS 3.0, revealing that iPhone OS 3.0 provides a nearly three-fold improvement in performance over OS 2.2.1 running on the same hardware. The shift to the iPhone 3GS increases performance a further three-fold.

This month's Vogue has a great interview with Mrs. Bill Gates, the lovely philanthropist Melinda Gates. The interview focuses on the Microsoft founder's better half, but there's a fun Apple rivalry moment in the piece, when the subject of the couples' kids is brought up. She says: "There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household. But iPods and iPhones are two things we don't get for our kids." Gates does admit to being swayed — a little— by Apple's smartphone, though: "Every now and then I look at my friends and say 'Ooh, I wouldn't mind having that iPhone'."

The latest news акщь Mobile World Congress. A new smartphone called the SonyEricsson Idou, equipped with display 3.5 "touchscreen with 640 × 320 pixels with 16:9 ratio, a 12.1 MP camera with xenon flash and the operating system Symbian Open Source! One more iPhone killer? We'll see.

According to the report of Devicescape, Wi-Fi applications developer, smartphone users prefer to use Wi-Fi rather than 3G.

During the servey 81% users would like to connect to Wi-Fi for internet browsing and email sending. About 86% said that Wi-Fi modules in phones are necessary. 82% would like to have special tariffs for 3G/Wi-Fi.

About 84% of people would like to see Wi-Fi spots everywhere. 56% of them are ready to pay for Wi-Fi service.

ZDNet Australia reports that banking "giant" HSBC is considering ditching the BlackBerry and switching over to the iPhone for its staff. HSBC has about 300,000 staff worldwide and this transition could result in 200,000 iPhone orders.

"We are actually reviewing iPhones from a HSBC Group perspective ... and when I say that, I mean globally," HSBC's Australia and New Zealand chief information officer Brenton Hush told ZDNet.com.au yesterday.

The battery life on Apple's new 3G iPhone isn't great, but it beats that of other 3G smartphones we've seen, say testers at PC World's Test Center. In the study's standard talk-time battery life test, an iPhone, on average, ran 5 hours and 38 minutes, a performance PC World deems "fair."

The original iPhone, which ran on AT&T's slower EDGE network, lasted 10 hours of our test. But the 3G iPhone beat out the rest of the current 3G smartphone pack, most of which fell shy of the five-hour mark that's the cutoff between a word score of fair and poor in PC World's performance ratings.

The iPhone 3G also beat out competitors on Sprint and Verizon's EVDO mobile broadband networks, including the Palm Centro (4:19) and the Samsung Instinct (5:33), PC World says.

There was an application called Apollo IM. It worked, but didn't work good - it hanged, dropeed connections, exited for no reason. Later there was MobileChat, which version 2.23-2 was much better than Apollo. It did work. It leasе I used it with ICQ many times. However it didn't have history and there were some problems with offline cyrillic messages.

Now there is AgileMessenger. It is quite popular, because it supports many phones (not just smartphones). Now it is avaliable for IPhone. The interface is good. Users can chat, send pictures, there is history. And history is saved even when you restart an application. There is even a traffic meter.